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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Not all fires are created equal. The problem with battery fires is that they are hard to put out. The surest way how to put out an EV is to drop it into a big water tank and let it soak for days.

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Firefighters regularly put out EV fires it just takes water from a hose. The biggest issue is a lot of the chemicals used to aid firefighting doesn’t work as well on battery fires. https://youtu.be/8n5Wf7TlGrU

Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year, it’s extremely common. ICE cars are actually 10x as likely to catch fire as EV’s. ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

Even taking your figure as accurate, how many fires per vehicle-mile driven? (And is NA just the US? US+CA+MX?)

It’s about 56 per billion miles which is a significant improvement over 40 years ago, but also a recent upswing.

https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-st...

>ICE cars also frequently catch fire while parked.

I don't think you and I have the same definitions of "frequently" or "extremely common".

>Also, there are 200,000 car fires in North America per year

There are almost 500,000,000 cars in North America.

...so the probability of a fire in an ICE car is about 0.04% per year? Assuming fires are randomly distributed (which is a bad assumption, granted) then over a lifetime of car ownership, the average individual has about a one in fifty chance of experiencing a vehicle fire. That is very much higher than I would have expected.

It is in relationship to fighter fighters not cars. Residual fires are only about twice as likely.

* residential

And while ICE cars are generally in use when this happens, EVs seem to love this doing stuff while not in use and in your home. You can never quite turn off an EV.

I'd love to see what the actuarial tables look like in a few years for home insurance. "Do you have an EV?" might become a factor, and not in the good while.

Happens with ICE cars all the time as well, there’s more than enough energy in a lead-acid battery to start a fire. I think our impression of the regularity is just a function of media attention.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bmw-mystery-fires-abc-news-i...

https://www.nfpa.org//-/media/Files/News-and-Research/Fire-s...

A lead-acid battery has enough power to start a fire however it is itself not particularly flammable. The danger with EV batteries isn’t that they have enough energy to cause an electrical fire, it’s that they are themselves quite flammable.

Parked ICE cars burn down too, here's an example where a completely stationary car caught fire and caused $100M in damages.

https://jalopnik.com/how-one-suv-fire-destroyed-45-million-i...

To be fair Ford issued a recall for the fire risk and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

> as a result of the blaze, much of it was trashed, all over a 2002 Ford Escape under recall.

Of course, and I'm sure if there is a wider issue with the ID3 then Volkswagen will issue a recall too. I'd imagine a lot of issues where the car can catch fire result in a recall.

>>and the owner didn't take it in to get fixed.

Yes, which actually resulted in a fascinating legal battle, because Ford says it's not their responsibility as they have issued a recall, and the owner says she changed address and there is nothing that would legally require her to inform the manufacturer of her car of that fact. So she really didn't know about the recall, which means the responsibility here is.......unknown, and at the heart of the $100M legal battle. One of the other fascinating things is that the Department of Justice has literally stepped in and said they don't agree for the owner of the car to be a side in such expensive case, and they are taking her place instead.

I am way more concerned by all the batteries in my house than the one parked in the garage. There are probably so many powerbanks, laptop batteries and other things lying around and in drawers where they are forgotten that it's a lot more likely that a house catches fire because of those batteries than an EV

Random gadgets with Li-ion from AliExpress is most dangerous one in my house. I don't keep it charged them unless I'm at the room.

I know of several people who have had their houses burn down because of an ICE car deciding to catch fire in the garage. Hyundai has recently recalled almost a million vehicles because they tend to catch fire while parked.

last i checked electric vehicles also use the same braking mechanisms and could catch fire for the same reasons : https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/hyundai-... , please post an actual link to a known case of an ICE vehicle spontaneously combusting while being turned off due to some component of the gas/gas system being the main cause of the combustion.

Oil leaking on to an exhaust manifold count?

https://money.cnn.com/2015/10/27/autos/gm-recall-fire/

As someone else mentioned, I wasn't trying to argue either car catches fire more or less. The parent was suggesting ICE cars catching fire while parked practically never happens, when millions of ICE cars in the last few years have been recalled for such things. Lots of people have had their houses burn down from ICE cars being parked inside. A parked car catching fire isn't something new to battery vehicles.

yes, thanks for pointing that out!

That's not really the argument, though. The argument is that all types of cars catch fire. It is not that ICE cars catch fire more.

If there is nothing nearby just let it burn down whats left is p save for the scrapyard.

Put it in water is nonsense. A cell that has not been damaged is watertight and wont react with the water but later on can burst into flames due to corrosion that opens the cell somehow or due to mechanical damage.

If you would put an fully functional EV into a lake for 3 weeks then let it dry for a few days it would burn just as good as it would have before it was soaked.

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